


slowly learning that life is okay

by queer-z0mbies (LaVoileBlanche)



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Episode rewrite: s04e13 The Seam, Episode: s04e13 The Seam, Everybody Lives, F/M, Fix-It, Fluff, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, POV Quentin Coldwater, Post-Monster reunion, Q deserved better and so did we, References to Depression, Some Plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-23 19:15:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,865
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18708295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaVoileBlanche/pseuds/queer-z0mbies
Summary: There isn’t a monster in the world that Quentin wouldn’t face, for a chance at this. Peaches and plums, he thinks, and Eliot hums into his mouth, as if in agreement. Peaches and motherfucking plums.





	slowly learning that life is okay

**Author's Note:**

> I literally started watching this show like two weeks before the finale aired. Arguably the worst possible timing. 
> 
> This fic kind of got out of hand. It's way longer than I ever intended, and slightly more self-indulgent, too.

Penny takes Josh to Fillory on the off-chance that having Magicians performing the bond from different worlds will help make it stronger, and Alice and Julia are setting up the spell to take them into the Mirror World in the Cottage’s front room, which leaves Quentin and Margo, holed up in the dining room, waiting for Penny to come back so they can finally, _finally_ go after Eliot, once and for all. The paper plates that he and Josh had brought back from the realm of the Old Gods lie forgotten on the table and the sickly-sweet smell of their frosting—rich vanilla—combines with the roil of anxiety thundering through him to make him feel sick and unsettled.

Margo isn’t even sitting, but is instead leaning against the edge of the table, rubbing her thumb over the sharp edge of Sorrow’s head, her nail polish shiny and flawless against the axe’s unforgiving blackness, her gaze far away. She hasn’t bothered to put her Fairy eye back in, and the novelty eyepatch she’s wearing is the kind of thing he’d probably find funny, if he thought he was capable of it. He knows she’s keeping the eye in her pocket, ready for when the plan needs it. Quentin wishes it was a better plan. The idea of saving Eliot has been the only thing keeping him going for weeks, the wind-up motor ticking in his chest, propelling him forward when nothing else could; now that their chance is so close, he’d give anything for just a little more time to get it right, to make it perfect.

“Hey, Q?” Margo asks, and Quentin tries to shake himself out of his reverie, straightening up to answer her.

“Yeah?” he says, rubbing his eye in a vain attempt to bring everything into focus. He’s been so tired for so long that he doesn’t really remember what it’s like not to be. But as long as they get Eliot back, it doesn’t matter. Quentin would sacrifice a lot more than just sleep to keep him safe.

“We’re gonna get him back, right?” Maybe if Quentin didn’t know her so well, he wouldn’t be able to hear the faint tremor in her voice.

“Of course we are,” he says, and makes himself believe it, if only because he doesn’t know what he’ll do if they don’t. Margo turns to him with half a smile, her lower lip trembling despite her best efforts to stop it.

“He’s going to be really fucking glad to see you,” she says, and he’s spared from having to come up with an answer by Penny’s arrival. He can’t think about anything after the next step of the plan, because everything past getting the Monster out of Eliot’s body is a surge of dark uncertainty, and if he even considers it, he’s scared he’ll be swept away.

“Kady says all the hedges are waiting on her word,” Penny says, glancing between the two of them. “And Josh is waiting for his rabbit in Fillory. Everything’s ready to go, if the two of you are.”

Quentin allows himself one brief moment to close his eyes and take a deep breath, then meets Margo’s eyes and picks the other Sorrow up from off the table. In his other hand, he’s already holding the demon-bottle.

“We’re ready,” he says, and Margo nods.

“Let’s go get our boy.” She takes hold of Penny’s arm, and, with his other hand, Penny takes hold of Quentin’s, and then they’re spinning through whatever in-between space it is that Travellers use and landing with a muffled _thump_ on a carpet of dry leaves, in the forest that Dean Fogg had pointed them to when they’d asked him where he’d sent the Monster.

Penny drops his hands and Quentin ushers them all behind a tree, and there he is. The Monster, not so far away, sitting on the floor with his back against a wide tree trunk, twirling a fallen leaf between his fingers. In this pose of relaxation, one long leg bent at the knee, the other eased out in front of him, he could almost, _almost_ be Eliot, except for Eliot’s affected disdain for all things nature-based. If Eliot were going to take some time to relax in the middle of the woods, he’d be doing it on a cushioned lounge chair with a bottle of wine in his hands. Quentin swallows that thought down and redirects his focus. Thoughts of Eliot have been running over the rough edges of his heart like a whetstone since he remembered who he was, but if he dwells on them too long, he’ll be useless. The weight of his absence is too much to hold; it threatens to crush him.

He looks quickly to Margo and she nods, pulling the eye from her pocket and bowling it towards the Monster to get a better perspective. She reaches out to clasp Quentin’s hand once, her gaze steely, and then she’s darting silently away through the trees. He watches her until she’s out of sight, on the Monster’s other side and hidden. His palm is sweaty around Sorrow’s handle.

“You ready?” Penny murmurs, and Quentin, holding himself together with the barest, clinging remains of hope, squeezes his eyes closed, clenches his jaw, and exhales.

“Yeah,” he says. And moves, Penny a step behind him.

They crash into the Monster’s clearing without even the semblance of stealth.

“Hey!” calls Quentin, waving the axe in his hand. His heart is racing so furiously he can’t distinguish between each individual beat—it sounds like one continuous roar, a pulse he can feel in his knees and his throat, in his teeth and fingernails. Just white noise, thudding through him. _Please, please let this work_.

The Monster climbs to its feet, that slow and languid grace that makes it look like the world is somehow shaping itself around him. When he steps towards them, he places his feet like the earth was made to hold him up. Quentin _does not_ think about how Eliot always distributes his weight unevenly, always leaning on one leg more than the other. Sorrow is as heavy as an anvil in his weak grasp. _Come on, Margo,_ he thinks. He knows with bone-deep certainty that he will not be able to swing at Eliot’s body, if it comes to it. Not in a million years.

The Monster raises his hand like Quentin has seen him do a dozen times, a death sentence in motion, and Quentin’s heart is in his throat—he refuses to die before Eliot is safe, it can’t happen, it _won’t_ —

“Over here, asshole.”

The Monster turns, and Margo swings Sorrow full-force into the meat of its— _Eliot’s_ —stomach. Blood sprays in an arc over the brown leaves and Margo’s coat, and the Monster staggers, a choked sound trapped in its throat. Time is torturously slow, for just a moment, the single second stretching out longer than Quentin can stand it—and then golden light is whispering out of the wound in Eliot’s stomach and into the demon-bottle and Penny is hurriedly pressing _send_ on the text that’s been waiting on his phone; Margo is dropping Sorrow and crashing to her knees beside Eliot’s body, which has fallen like a broken branch, like nothing’s holding it up anymore.

“Alright, come _on_ ,” Penny says, nudging him hard, and he unfreezes, dropping the other Sorrow, his hands snapping into position over the demon-bottle. The spell for the incorporate bond works through him without any conscious input; he can’t stop himself from being distracted by the way Margo’s voice sounds as her shaking hands press down on the bloody gash in Eliot’s stomach, by the impossibly bright spill of the blood on the ground, on his clothes and his pale skin, on her hands and Sorrow’s blade. In the tiny part of him that is able to have any objectivity about what is happening, he can sense that the spell is working, but he can’t even be glad about it, not with Eliot lying so unmoving on the dirt, Margo calling his name brokenly as his blood continues to pool.

“It’s finished, it’s done,” says Penny, and Quentin can feel the truth of it singing through him, the spell’s power coming to a swift and triumphant conclusion that he just doesn’t care about at all.

“Put that with the other one, then come back and get help,” he says over his shoulder, already running to close the short distance between himself and Eliot. He doesn’t bother to check if Penny obeys, just falls to his knees and piles his hands atop Margo’s, adding pressure to the wound. He dares to glance up at Eliot’s face and regrets it when he sees the grey pallor of his skin, the blood dotting his lips and his chin. He presses down harder on his stomach.

“Come on, Eliot.” He can hear the plea in his voice. On Eliot’s other side, Margo is weeping from her single eye, blood coating her hands and splattered on her clothes, in her hair. A million years ago, he had had a vision like this, walking into the lab with Alice to find that the Beast had already been there. It is a thousand times worse in real life.

“Eliot, Eliot, come on, you bastard,” Margo is saying. Her hands move restlessly over his stomach like she wants to cover the whole span of the wound, but it’s too long. “Don’t do this, you stupid, _selfish_ motherfucker, don’t leave me here.”

She balls one hand into a fist and brings it down on his chest, hard, her whole body bowing over him so that her long hair hides her face, a portrait of grief and rage so potent it’s almost animal.

“Fuck you,” she says. “Come back to me, you fucking asshole. _Please_.”

But Quentin is watching Eliot’s face, tears blurring his vision, and there’s just nothing and nothing and _nothing_ , not a twitch or a flicker to indicate life. The edges of the vast, drowning numbness that has sheltered him from the worst effects of the Monster’s monstrosity begin to flake and fracture, like dry earth; if it gives way now, he won’t survive it.

“Eliot!” A jagged edge rips right through the middle of Margo’s voice, more of a howl than anything else, and like the sun spilling daylight over the horizon, like Fillory’s two golden moons reappearing from behind a cloud, like the moment Quentin realised that magic was real, Eliot’s eyes flutter open, and roll towards Margo. The corners of his bloody mouth lift in the smallest of smiles.

“Really, Bambi,” he says, and that’s his _voice_ , for the first time in weeks, his real voice—even weak and hoarse, his voice, and not the awful, hollow echo of it the Monster had spoken with. It goes through Quentin like an arrow. “There’s no need to shout.”

Margo’s breath hitches and she twists her hands into his t-shirt to lever herself upright. Quentin spreads his hands over his stomach a little desperately, trying to compensate for her absence while she takes his face in both her palms, smearing it with blood.

“You son of a bitch,” she says, blinking back tears, her voice shaking like an earthquake. “Stay with me, alright?”

“Of course,” he murmurs, sounding faintly delirious. “Whatever you want, Bambi.”

He half-lifts his hand, reaching for her, but he lacks the strength—his arm wavers in the air and drops, landing on his stomach. His too-cool fingers bump against Quentin’s and the touch is electric, bright and exquisitely painful. When their eyes meet, that feels like lightning, too. Quentin opens his mouth, but there are no words for this thing he is feeling, this terrible, crushing conflict of fear and hope, joy and terror, this avalanche of sensation that’s just _burying_ him.

“Q,” Eliot says, and manages a smile for him, too. “Hey.”

 _Q, hey, Q, hey, Q, hey_. Quentin feels like he is falling from a very great height. Eliot lifts his head just enough to look down at the slick blood coating his fingers.

“Oh,” he says, just this soft little syllable, like you’d say, _oh, it’s raining_ , or _oh, I almost forgot my keys._  This breathless little nothing of a sound that splits Quentin in two. He furrows his brows, looking between the two of them. “Am I dying again?”

“ _No,”_ Margo growls, returning her hands to help Quentin press down on the wound.

 _No,_ Quentin thinks, but he means it like a prayer.

“Just—stay awake, okay?” he says, because it’s all he can say. Eliot breathes a little sigh, like Quentin’s asked him for an inconvenient favour.

“Fine,” he says, “but only for you.”

Even still, his eyelids begin to droop. Bodies are not built to take the kind of punishment his has been under. Even without the pulsing wound left by Sorrow, there’s withdrawal and hunger and lack of sleep—the Monster had taken even less care of Eliot’s body than Quentin had taken of his own.

“Eliot,” he says, wanting to shake him, not daring to move his hands. _Where is Penny?_ “El, c’mon, stay with us.”

“Don’t make me cut you again,” Margo threatens, but Eliot doesn’t seem to hear, eyes falling closed once more. “Eliot. Eliot!”

And then—Quentin could kiss him—Penny reappears. He stares for a moment in horror at the scene before him, but then Margo snaps, “Don’t just fucking stand there, he needs help!”

And that jolts him into action, dropping down at her side and placing his hands on their shoulders.

“Whatever you do, don’t let go of him,” he says, as if either of them ever would. Quentin knows that you aren’t supposed to move trauma victims in case you make their injuries worse, but as Penny blinks them away, he’s fervently hoping that the same rules don’t apply to magical teleportation.  

When the world materialises, he sees that they’re on the floor of the Brakebills infirmary, and Margo is already yelling for help. Quentin looks down into Eliot’s face and hopes he’s imagining how much paler it looks. Julia hadn’t been as bad as this, he’s sure of it.

Penny gets up and backs away immediately, giving room to the medics who swarm in to help, but Quentin can’t make himself do the same. He knows he’s being completely irrational, that the best thing he could do for Eliot would be to step away and let Professor Lipson do her job, but he can’t shake the panicked conviction that his hands on Eliot’s skin are tethering him, somehow, to life. If he moves them, he feels like there will be nothing to stop Eliot from drifting away from them, forever.

Opposite him, Margo is undergoing the same crisis, but far more aggressively—she elbows the first medic who tries to gently pull her away straight in the groin, and it isn’t until Penny gets his hands on her shoulders and tugs, whispering into her ear, that she finally allows herself to be separated from Eliot, tears flooding her cheeks.

There are hands on Quentin’s shoulders, too, gentle but firm, and then a voice in his ear that he recognises as Professor Lipson’s.

“Come on, Quentin,” she says, pulling him away. “You need to let us work.”

He moves woodenly, like a marionette held up with nothing but string, and as soon as their way is clear, the medical staff of the infirmary swoop in, lifting Eliot on a stretcher and placing it on a gurney, wheeling him away without a backwards look, speaking in quick, urgent tones to each other.

The wrongness he feels watching Eliot disappear is like someone wrenching something from his chest. Margo, still standing in Penny’s loose grip, makes a noise like a wounded tiger, and wrestles herself away from him. For a second Quentin thinks she’s going to follow after Eliot, Lipson be damned, but instead, she just crosses the space between them and seizes his wrist in her blood-coated palm.

“Q,” she says. Her nails dig into his skin painfully. “Q, they have to save him.”

He is intimately familiar with the wildness in her one-eyed stare as she looks up at him. He opens his mouth—to reassure her, maybe—but his throat is too constricted to speak. He’s still crying, in a way that he is only peripherally aware of, mute and dreadful.

“They will.” Penny steps forward, a little hesitant. “Lipson knows what she’s doing, alright? Eliot’s in the best place he could be—you two have done everything you can.”

That doesn’t feel true. He’s sure that if he could just be a little bit smarter or braver or stronger, a little bit better at magic or a little bit faster or a little bit less selfish, he could do more. He just—he needs Eliot to be alright in a way that he has never needed anything before. It feels more integral than oxygen; it’s all he’s wanted for so long that this useless _waiting_ feels shameful, like a decadence. There must be something else he can do.

“I’m going to take the monster-bottles to Julia and Alice,” Penny continues. “I think you should stay here.”

Quentin shakes his head blindly, even as the desire to take his advice swells up within him. “No, I should—I should be there, what if something goes wrong, I can—maybe I could help, I—”

“No offence, man, but you’re not in any sort of shape to be helping.” Penny claps him on the shoulder, and it’s an awkward kind of camaraderie—they aren’t really _friends_ —but Quentin appreciates that he’s trying. “I’ll go to the Seam with Alice, alright? I’ll make sure it all goes to plan, and then we’ll come back. Take a beat and let someone else handle this, yeah?” He lifts his hand away and nods towards the doors behind which Eliot had disappeared. “He’s going to need you when he wakes up.”

 _If he wakes up,_  the very worst part of Quentin’s brain thinks, and that’s all it takes—the room sways like he’s on a boat, the floor tipping under his feet. Margo’s grip tightens around his wrist like a vice. It feels like it’s the only reason he’s still standing.

“Okay,” he says, voice cracking. “Okay.”

“We’re gonna take care of it, Quentin,” Penny promises, and then he’s backing out of the room at a half-run. There’s a bank of white plastic chairs bolted to the wall and, leaning on each other like the walking wounded, he and Margo stagger over to them and sink down. They don’t speak, but Margo pulls his hand into her lap and squeezes it until he can feel their pulses beat against each other. The blood has dried on their skin, rust-coloured and flaking where it rubs against their clothes. Margo leans her head against his shoulder and he feels the fabric of his shirt growing damp with her tears. There is a thrashing, angry part of him that knows he should be helping Alice with the Seam, but the part of him that is yearning after Eliot with every fibre is louder by far.

Hours pass in that terrible silence. Alice had said that time passes differently in the Mirror World, so inasmuch as Quentin is capable of not worrying about anything, he isn’t yet worried that he hasn’t heard from any of the others. The light through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the infirmary goes golden as the sun descends, and eventually, Professor Lipson enters, looking grimly exhausted but not defeated. Margo climbs to her feet in an instant, dropping Quentin’s hand, and stalks up to her.

“Where—”  
  
Lipson cuts her off with a raised hand. Quentin rises slowly, feeling half-dead and dreamlike, unready to hear whatever she is about to say but at the same time needing to hear nothing more.  

“He’s stable,” she says, and the relief is almost strong enough to cut his legs out from under him. A strange, serrated noise comes gasping out of Margo’s throat. “The severity of the wound and the stress his body has been under will mean that recovery will take time, but he’s a fighter. He’s going to be fine.”

“Can we see him?” Margo asks, sounding haggard. Professor Lipson nods.

“He’s under heavy sedation, so it’s highly unlikely he’ll be conscious, but if you clean yourselves up,” she says, looking pointedly at their bloodsoaked clothes and hands, “you can go and sit with him.”

Margo looks like she’s considering going straight through Lipson, bloodstains or no, but Lipson just crosses her arms and for maybe the first time in Quentin’s memory, Margo backs down first. She turns back to him.

“Q, come on,” she says, and he goes, mechanically.

There’s a small bathroom off the infirmary’s main ward, and they stand over the sinks and scrub Eliot’s blood off of themselves with cheap hand soap and cold water until their skin prickles. Quentin’s forearms are lobster-pink by the time he’s finished. They can’t do anything about their clothes, but luckily when they emerge, Professor Lipson seems satisfied, anyway. She leads them to one of the small, private rooms where Quentin’s never been before, her shoes clicking sharply on the floor.

She stops in front of the door, and Quentin can feel his heart pulsing in his chest like it’s a stress ball, squeezed and released by a giant hand. Eliot is behind that door. Eliot is alive, and he’s going to be fine, and he’s _just behind that door_.

“I’m going to leave you with him,” she says, lowering her voice. “Do _not_ touch his bandages.”

“Thank you,” Quentin manages, through his throat dry as dust. She just nods and turns back the way they had come, returning to the main infirmary. Before the sound of her heels on the floorboards has faded, Margo is wresting open the door and throwing herself inside. Quentin barely has time to follow her before the door falls closed behind them, with a quiet click.   

The room is dimly lit, blinds drawn over the window and the clinical white light softened until it falls like moonlight on the high bed in the centre of the floor.

Before he had been old enough to enjoy Fillory, Quentin had feasted himself full on fairy tales—the saccharine-sweet adventures of knights and princes, the valiant rescues of half a dozen different princesses. Eliot would laugh at him, but when he stops in the doorway of that small, silent room and sees him lying there, he understands with a sudden, piercing clarity what every prince must have felt, climbing the stairs of all those dragon-guarded towers to find the sleeping princess awaiting at the top.

Eliot’s hair is still greasy and too-long, but someone has cleaned the blood from his face and his skin glows moon-pale against the off-white pillowcase, his eyes peacefully closed. A light blue blanket has been pulled up to his waist and beneath it he’s been changed into the plain white pyjamas the infirmary favours. The shirt bulges slightly where his bandages lie under it. An IV lead is plugged into the crook of his elbow, the clear tape that holds in place ever-so-slightly askew, but it isn’t as bad as Quentin had feared—he’s breathing on his own, slow, untroubled breaths that unlock Quentin’s own lungs a little bit, and there are no more tubes or wires that he can see. One hand lies palm up by his side, like an invitation; the other rests across his stomach as if he’s still protecting his injury. If it weren’t for the fact that Quentin knows he never sleeps on his back, it would seem like nothing was wrong.

There are two thinly-cushioned chairs beside Eliot’s bed, one on each side, but Margo acts like they aren’t there, perching on the mattress beside Eliot’s blanketed shins, reaching out to clasp his hand in hers. Quentin is jealous of the ease with which she inhabits his space, the unself-conscious surity of her welcome. He slinks to the chair on the other side of the bed and, sitting, cannot make himself take Eliot’s other hand. It doesn’t feel like it’s something he should be allowed. Instead, he just watches his face, drinking in the details. He wonders why it doesn’t feel worse, why the Monster doesn’t loom out of those unconscious features and remind him of the hell his life has been ever since he found him, but he’s grateful for it, even if he doesn’t understand. He has spent so long not looking at Eliot that to be able to look now, openly and for as long as he likes, feels like a gift, god-given.

“You know, I really thought he was dead,” says Margo, and there’s an almost dreamlike note in her voice. When he looks up at her, she’s still staring down into Eliot’s face. If he wasn’t the only other conscious person in the room, he wouldn’t even be sure she was speaking to him.

Quentin swallows. “I know. So did I.”

It’s something he can’t stop thinking about—how close he was to losing him, forever, just because he’d believed the Monster’s lie. It’s a punishing thought, a thought that makes self-loathing flick like a whip against his back. Margo looks at him, then.

“You haven’t told me how you knew he wasn’t,” she says, and he recognises it for the demand that it is. He clears his throat, half-stalling, glancing quickly back at Eliot’s sleeping face as if for encouragement. _Peaches and plums, motherfucker_ , he remembers, and the memory is indelible.

“He, uh. I don’t know what happened but—but he, like, broke through. He was the Monster, and then he was Eliot, just for like, ten seconds. And then I knew.”

It feels like an inadequate description of what had happened, but Quentin doesn’t know how to explain the way it had felt to hear glorious, incontrovertible proof of Eliot’s life—like something was being stripped from him, baring him to a balmy, purifying light. Like he had been struck by lightning.

Margo nods slowly, looking back at Eliot, her thumb rubbing slowly back and forth across his knuckles. She smiles, kind of heartbrokenly. “I wish I’d been there.”

Quentin doesn’t know what to say to that, but she doesn’t seem to need a response, anyway, and so he just joins her in her silent contemplation of Eliot’s features. He tries to imagine what the first thing is he’ll say, when he wakes up again—something witty, probably. Some joke about what he’s wearing or about Margo’s eyepatch, something to try and make them laugh, make them forget that he could’ve died so recently, that neither of them have seen him in months. And then Margo will yell at him, and maybe the last sharp-edged piece of Quentin’s heart that refuses to settle will finally click into place instead of twisting painfully against his ribs, like a swallowed razor blade, the way it has been doing for so long.

The room feels claustrophobic, like a tomb. He can’t stand the stillness of it, the silence. He gets up, and just to give himself something to do, pours a glass of water from the standing jug on the table next to the bed. He wonders why it’s there—whether it would be there for Eliot even if there was no-one to help him drink, even if he was unconscious for so long that it turned stagnant. It feels absurd in the way that almost everything feels absurd right now, everything but the reality of Eliot’s body on the bed, hurt and healing. He sits down with his glass of water and doesn’t drink it.

Bizarrely, he is thinking about Brian. Brian’s steady job and his weakness for expensive lattes, Brian’s collection of second-hand paperbacks and his unpretentious disinterest in fantasy and science fiction. Brian’s girlfriend, with her red hair in choppy braids and all her floral-print summer dresses. How many lives can one person be expected to live? He feels like a song that he only knows half the words to. If only Eliot would open his eyes, everything would return to hazardous, unpredictable normality; the world would still be disappointing and unfair and full of meaningless suffering, but it would be okay, because Eliot would be in it. He knows that if he could have just that scrap of rightness restored, he could face off the rest of it. It’s like a bargain he makes with himself, with the universe, with whoever’s listening. _Please, just give me this_. He knows it’s inexcusably selfish, and doesn’t care.

There’s no telling how long it’s been since Penny left them in the infirmary, but the longer it goes without hearing about the Seam, the more Quentin starts to worry—like the lens of his anxiety is zooming out from focusing on Eliot to encompass Alice and Julia and Penny, too. He’s trying to work up the courage to go and find out what’s happening when the door bursts open, and there’s Alice, looking like she’s been blown in by a thunderstorm, leaning forward on the balls of her feet the way she always does when something’s gone so wrong she doesn’t know how to fix it.

“Q,” she says, breathless, and he hardly has time to stand up before she’s throwing herself into his arms. He looks over her shoulder, frowning in confusion at Penny and Julia, who have entered the room behind her, both looking sober. Still perched on the end of Eliot’s bed, Margo half-turns, as if their entrance is a mildly interesting commercial she’s happened to turn on while flicking through to the show she really wants to watch.

“What the fuck happened to you?” she asks. Alice pulls back from Quentin, her eyes wide and distressed, but she can’t seem to bring herself to speak.

“Everett was there,” Julia says, and when Quentin and Margo both turn to her, she elaborates, “At the Seam. I had already thrown in the bottle with the Monster’s sister but there was no time to get rid of the other one before he got there.” She folds her arms tightly across her chest as if she’s cold, and Penny moves in a little closer to her. “He broke the mirror. I don’t know how he did it—he shouldn’t have been able to—but he did. Maybe the Library knows more about it than we thought, but—however he did it, it meant we couldn’t throw the Monster in anymore.”

The hunted, anxious look on her face aside, she looks surprisingly well. Her speedy recovery seems almost obnoxious while Eliot lies still in the middle of the room, but he’s glad for it. Penny had told him about what she had been like when he had first transported her to the infirmary, but now, thanks to the Binder, she’s suffering none of the physical ailments of her possession. And, thanks to Penny’s quick-thinking inception skills, soon she’ll be able to wield demigoddess level power. She isn’t Our Lady of the Tree anymore, but, with a little time, she will be at least as powerful as Reynard’s son had been—and there will be no other gods coming to whisk her off. The Binder had offered her an ultimatum, and Julia had—as Julia always did—said _fuck that_ , and made her own path. Quentin had missed her. He is profoundly grateful that the Monster hadn’t gotten to her earlier—he doesn’t know what he would have done, if he had had to somehow go on without her and Eliot both.

“So what?” says Margo. “Where’s the Monster now?”

Quentin thinks he’s the only one who sees her grip tighten on Eliot’s hand, reflexively.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Alice says, and even though it was Margo who asked, she’s looking at Quentin, begging him to understand. “I had to give Everett the bottle, or he would’ve torn the Mirror World to pieces. We would’ve all been killed.”

Quentin doesn’t blame her—of course he doesn’t, he wouldn’t trade their safety for anything—but still, his stomach gives a sick lurch at the idea of Everett having all that power. He closes his eyes, just for a moment.

“Where did he go?” he asks, opening them.

“We don’t know.” Alice crosses her arms, hunching over herself. “He opened the bottle, but when he absorbed the Monster, I don’t think—I think something went wrong.”

“He didn’t seem like he had control of it,” Julia adds. “It was like he was fighting with the Monster.”

“And? Who won?” Margo asks, the edge of impatience in her voice, and Alice shrugs miserably.

“We don’t know. We just got out of there as fast as we could.”

Silence follows her words as everyone acknowledges what that means. Everett is out there somewhere, and he’s either harnessed the Monster’s godlike power, or he’s become the strongest puppet in history. Either way, once again, they’re fucked.

And then, momentously, a quiet, wordless sound of discomfort from the back of Eliot’s throat, the rustle of the sheets as his legs shift. Quentin forgets, in an instant, all about Everett and the Monster, about Alice and Penny and Julia; his attention is focused like a laser on the pained twitch that tugs Eliot’s mouth into a frown, on the way his eyes blink slowly open, his brows bent over them as his half-lidded gaze passes unseeingly over the room and lands on Margo. Her whole body curves around their joined hands as she stares hungrily, hopefully, down into his face.

“Bambi?” he murmurs. He sounds only half-conscious, his voice rough and clotted with weary confusion. Still, it makes Quentin feel like he’s been electrocuted.

 “Yeah, baby,” she says. It’s as if the rest of the world has faded out of existence—as if she only sees him. Her voice is thick with tears.“I’m here.”

“Maybe we should continue this conversation elsewhere,” Penny says, keeping his voice low, and Julia nods. He holds open the door for her and she passes under his arm with a tight smile up at him. Alice moves to follow but stops when she realises that Quentin is still standing, rooted to the spot. He feels magnetised, his body singing with an agonising need to just be there, to stay at least until Eliot notices him. Horribly suspended between Eliot and the open door, he cannot move until Alice steps carefully up to him and takes his hand, pulling gently.

“He’s going to be okay, Q,” she says, and he nods, numb. When he takes a fleeting last look over his shoulder, Margo has her arms around Eliot’s neck and her face buried in his shoulder while he clumsily strokes her back, eyes brimming. It’s a good thing, he thinks as the door swings close behind them, that Eliot hadn’t been looking at him. If he had, he doesn’t know how he would have made himself leave.

Alice’s hand is warm in his. He lets her lead him after Penny and Julia, back to the Cottage where the mirror still stands; the bar has been pushed aside to make room for it. Alice brings him to sit on the window bench while Julia takes a nearby armchair, Penny settling behind her on its arm.

“We need to tell Kady what’s happened, in case Everett decides to go after the hedges,” Julia says. She looks at Penny in silent question, and he nods, blinking out of sight. No-one seems certain of what to do while they wait for him to return; Quentin keeps looking out the window, thinking about Eliot, and he can feel Alice’s nervous gaze on the side of his face, and he can hear Julia shifting in the armchair like she can’t get comfortable, but no-one speaks. They need to come up with a plan, but thinking about it is like butting up against an invisible wall. He feels like he’s run out of plans, maybe forever.

When Penny reappears, they are all grateful for the way it shears the atmosphere in two.

“Kady says Everett hasn’t come by for them yet,” he says. “She says since the spell’s done, she and Pete are going to try and get all the hedges underground. She thinks we should talk to Zelda—she knew Everett best, she might know what his plan is.”

“Only if he _is_ Everett, though,” says Alice, biting her lip. “For all we know, the Monster won.”

“If the Monster won, he’ll be looking for his sister again,” says Julia. “He still might not know what happened to her, so—”

“So he’ll be looking in the last place they were together,” Penny finishes, nodding. “The Library. Okay, so, do we go looking for him, try and trap him again?”

“We can’t,” Quentin says. The conversation almost feels like it’s been happening behind a thick glass wall, like he’s on the wrong side of an aquarium tank, but he can’t let them talk themselves into hunting the Monster down; with superhuman effort, he drags his sluggish mind back into the fray. “He’ll be expecting us, now, and besides, we can’t generate the energy for the bond, not if all the hedge witches are in hiding.”

Alice looks relieved that he’s contributing. “Maybe we could convince them to wait—”

He shakes his head. “No. It’s too dangerous. Any hedge witch who helps us now is going to be painting a target on their back; we can’t ask them to take that risk again.”

“So what, then?” says Penny. He sounds almost angry, like he wants to somehow blame Quentin for it all. Quentin can’t fault him for it; he feels, in some inscrutable sense, like he _is_ responsible. Maybe things would have gone differently if it’d been him in the Mirror World, and not them. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know.” God, he’s tired. He scrubs at his eyes until he sees spots. “We don’t know where Everett is, or what he wants, or whether he’s even in control, so we can’t stop him. And if the Monster is in control, well, chances are he’s going to come for us, eventually. He knows we’re the ones who trapped him before.”

As always, they are in imminent danger, the life-or-death kind of danger that he hadn’t thought he’d ever be able to get used to. But the threat feels distant and inevitable, like an incoming nuclear missile from the other side of the world. He can’t summon the right response; fear, anger, determination—they all evade him. He can only think about how bitterly unfair it is, and even that thought comes lethargically. How long has it been since he last slept? He can’t remember.   

He stands, with the half-formed intention of going to bed. If the Monster is going to track them down and kill them, he’d rather not just sit, watching the clock tick down towards the end of his life. Better to be unconscious. Alice stands, too, looking like she’s about to ask where he’s going, but before she can, the door in the Fillory clock swings open and spits out Josh, and, a step behind him, Fen.

They both manage to keep their feet under them, and straighten up. Fen beams, the crown of the High King sitting comfortably on her brow; Josh holds his arms out in front of him in an expansive, showmanlike gesture.

“Hola,” he says, clapping his hands together. “Margo had Todd send us a rabbit—it worked, right?”

“Where’s Eliot?” Fen asks brightly, peering around as if she thinks they could be hiding him from her.  She’s almost bouncing on the soles of her feet, like her body can’t contain her excitement at the idea of seeing him again. Quentin, remembering what Margo had told him about the grieving process over in Fillory, wonders if Eliot has ever really realised how much she cares about him. Seeing her bright, guileless expression, he can’t bring himself to tell either her or Josh about the new impending threat. A quick glance around at the others makes it clear they feel the same; Alice is biting her lip awkwardly, and Julia is toying with her fingers so she doesn’t have to make eye contact. Penny is halfway across the room, pretending to examine a forgotten book on the coffee table.

“I’ll take you to him,” Quentin hears himself say. He wonders if this had been what he was waiting for, an excuse to return to Eliot’s side. Certainly there’s at least one small part of him that’s relieved to be getting out of the stifling, futile atmosphere that hangs over the Cottage, and an even larger part that’s determined to spend as much time with Eliot as he can, just in case it really is nearly the end.

Alice frowns at him. “Quentin, are you sure that’s important right now?”

She sounds almost hurt; he wishes he had something more to offer her but instead he looks at her, and gives a hopeless shrug. “I don’t know what else to do, Alice. I’m sorry.”

“Q,” Julia objects softly, looking disappointed, but he can give her nothing, either. He gestures Fen and Josh—frowning, now, having picked up on the tension in the air—towards the door and moves to follow them.

“Q,” says Alice, as he’s about to step through the door. He has his hand on the doorknob; he clenches it into a fist just once, feeling like the lowest person in the world, feeling the cold metal against his skin. He turns back to face her, a wordless question on his face, and she says, “You should take some of his clothes back with you. For when he’s allowed to get up.”

Her expression is complicated—part sorrow, part understanding. He knows, then, that she’s put it together, him and Eliot, and the guilt is crushing. She deserves better.

“Right,” he says, nodding. “Yeah.” Fen and Josh are standing expectantly on the doorstep, and he gestures for them to wait. “I’ll be back. Just, uh, hold on a second.”

He doesn’t meet anyone’s eyes as he climbs up the stairs to Eliot’s bedroom, holding onto the banister because he thinks he’ll collapse if he doesn’t. The door to Eliot’s room is closed, has been closed for months—the new Physical Kids had been living somewhere different since the McAllisters had bought Brakebills, and all their stuff, abandoned such a long time ago, is untouched. Dust is thick on the carpet, muffling his steps, and the floorboards all creak in the same places. He takes hold of the doorknob and, ridiculously, tears sting his eyes. He swallows them down, refusing to crack again, and pushes the door open.

Inside, the light falls ghostlike through the white net curtains, catching on the tiny particles that spin in the air. There are clothes everywhere; Quentin closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to picture Eliot, blowing like a hurricane around the room, trying to decide what to wear. It still smells like him, faintly, like wine and expensive cologne, like cigarettes. He buries his face in his hands and breathes deep, biting hard on the inside of his cheek to keep himself from crying.

Someone clears their throat behind him. He hadn’t even realised he wasn’t alone. He turns, and there’s Alice, looking like she isn’t sure she made the right choice in following him. She’s wearing short sleeves, or he thinks she’d be tucking her hands into them. He hurriedly swipes the moisture from his eyes.

“Alice,” he says. “Sorry, I’ll be down in a minute, I just—”

His throat closes up. He tries to smile but knows it falls flat from the expression on her face.

“Sorry,” he says again, and she strides across the room in three short steps and wraps her arms around him, tight. It punches the breath out of him; she holds him like she’s trying to hold him together, and when she pulls away, her eyes are wet behind her glasses.

“I love you, Quentin Coldwater.” Her voice is firm, like she’s daring him to deny it. He doesn’t.

“I love you, too,” he says. That much, he thinks, will be true forever, even if he doesn’t always know how he means it.

“I know you do.” She wets her lips, like she isn’t sure she wants to go on. But she’s always been brave, so she raises her chin and meets his eyes steadily when she says, “But you love Eliot, as well. Don’t you?”

What can he say? Even if he lies, how can he pretend that saving Eliot hasn’t been his only priority for longer than he cares to think about? What is that, if not proof positive?

“Yes,” he says, closing his eyes. The strength of that simple truth rocks through him like a great wave; there’s some relief in admitting it, even as his guts twist with guilt. He forces his eyes open—he owes her better than hiding. She doesn’t seem surprised by his admission, which makes sense. She’s the smartest person he knows, and the way he’s been raggedly coming undone ever since Eliot was possessed hasn’t exactly been subtle.

“Okay,” she says, nodding. “So, what do you want to do?”

He blinks, furrowing his brow. “What do you mean?”

“I mean—” She crosses her arms over her chest, a little defensively. “Do you still want to be with me?”

Does he? He feels blindsided by the question, even though the answer feels like it should be obvious. The thing is, being with Alice is comfortable; it’s easy. They’re both being so much more careful with each other than they’d ever been before, too scared of fucking it up again to do anything different. They’d kissed, and it had been nice—but it had felt like a lie, too. Like they were trying to summon up the past, play-acting the people they once were, when things still seemed simple. Maybe he just isn’t trying hard enough. He can remember how happy they had been but he sees the image of it as if on a TV screen—it doesn’t feel like it’s something he can grasp, anymore.

“I don’t know,” he says. She furrows her brows, looking disappointed.

“That shouldn’t be a difficult question, Q,” she says, softly, and he _knows_ that, of course he does. But it is.

“I don’t know what you want me to say, Alice. I _want_ to want to be with you.”

She gives a tiny, sorrowful smile. “That isn’t the same thing.”

He just looks at her, unable to offer anything more, hating himself. It shouldn’t be like this, he thinks. He shouldn’t be so hung up on his best friend that he’s breaking the heart of the smartest, bravest person he’s ever met, the first person he really ever loved. There was a time he would have done anything to be with her, but he can’t remember how it had felt to be that version of himself. He loves her, but not the right way.

“Do you want to be with him?” she asks.

He hadn’t seen that question coming, although he probably should have. _I was with him_. _I was with him for a lifetime_. The air leaves his lungs in a great gust.

“I don’t know,” he says again. It feels more like a lie, this time, and he knows she senses it, too.

“Okay,” she nods. She draws a deep breath, looking down for a moment. When she meets his gaze again, her eyes are clear and steady. “I’m breaking up with you, Q.”

“Alice—”

She holds up a hand.

“The thing is,” she says, “we’ve both changed a lot. We made each other really happy once, but I don’t know if we can, anymore. And I know I fucked up, but so did you, and I’m not going to resign myself to being your second choice.” She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose, lifting her chin. “I deserve better than that. I deserve to be happy.”

“I know you do,” he says. He wants to fix this, somehow, to give her what she wants, but he can’t. She isn’t even asking him to, and that’s almost the worst part.

“We both do, Quentin,” she says. She takes both of his hands in her own. “Even if it’s not together. We had our time, and it was good. But it’s okay if it’s over.” She squeezes his hands, her eyes searching his like she wants to make sure he understands. “It’s going to be okay.”

He can feel his lip trembling—he’s always hated how easily he cries, but when the first sob breaks out from somewhere deep in his chest, Alice doesn’t do anything but embrace him again, holding his head down against her while his shoulders shake under her other hand. He’s not even sure where the tears are coming from—whether he’s happy or sad or something else entirely—but Alice holds him until they run out. He disentangles himself from her, sniffing, feeling wrung out and kind of dizzy, but miraculously, in spite of it all, a little bit more like himself.

“Sorry,” he says, and she smiles, fond and sad.

“I told you, it’s okay,” she says. “We’re still going to be friends. I’m still going to be here for you.”

He doesn’t deserve her at all. He drops her hands to wipe the tear tracks from his face and she looks awkwardly around the room, seeming a little overwhelmed.

“I don’t know where to start,” he admits, gesturing at a nearby pile of clothes, and she gives him a little understanding smile.

“Do you want me to help?”

He lets out a wet chuckle, surprising himself. He isn’t really sure when the last time he laughed was. “Yes, please.”

Afterwards, they return downstairs, and Alice rests Eliot’s shoes—handsome, oxblood leather—on top of the neat pile folded in Quentin’s arms, and leans up on her tiptoes to give him a soft kiss on the cheek.

“I’m going to try and look for a way to stop Everett,” she says. “Say hello to Eliot for me.”

“I will. Be careful.”

“You, too.”

With a final smile, he steps outside and closes the door behind him.

“Let’s go,” he says. If they notice the redness of his eyes, neither Fen nor Josh mentions it. He fills them in on the latest about Everett as they cross the campus to the infirmary, and they take it gravely.

“That was Fillory’s magic,” says Fen, scowling. “It wasn’t his to take.”

“I don’t think that matters to him,” says Quentin. The peaceful feeling that his talk with Alice had left him with is evaporating quickly, leaving him leaden and exhausted once again. He doesn’t know when his life turned into just one problem after another.

“Do we have a plan?” Josh asks, pushing open the infirmary door.

“Not yet.”

When they get to Eliot’s room, Quentin stops in front of the door, feeling awkward, and shifts the clothes in his grip so he can knock.

“Fuck off!” Margo’s voice comes from within, so, with a sigh, he opens the door. Fen ducks in ahead of him with a swiftness that, coming from anyone else, would seem rude, and Josh follows her, so Quentin is the last one in. He wastes time pulling the door all the way shut, just to give himself a moment more to prepare for seeing Eliot’s face.

There is no preparing for it. Margo has migrated to the chair on the bed’s left side, still holding his hand, and he is more or less upright, propped up by half-a-dozen plump white pillows. Someone has removed the IV from his arm. There is a moment where he and Quentin lock eyes, and time stops, and Quentin feels like the whole world is releasing its breath—this great depressurisation, as if he’d been suffocating, and just hadn’t realised yet.

Then Fen squeals, and Eliot’s attention is diverted, and the moment breaks.

“I’m so happy to see you!” Fen says. She makes as if to throw herself at him, but Margo bars her way, lifting an arm to block her.

“Easy,” she says. “He’s still healing.”

Eliot rolls his eyes.

“I’m fine,” he says. God, his voice. Quentin feels like he’ll never get used to how good it is to hear again. “Come here.”

He beckons Fen with his free hand, and, much more carefully, she leans in to wrap him in a hug that he can only half-return, his other hand still firmly in Margo’s possession. When Fen breaks away from him, Quentin sees the glint of happy tears in her eyes.

“I missed you,” she says, and Eliot’s eyes are soft as he smiles at her.

“I missed you, too,” he says. He taps the tip of her nose with one finger, and she giggles.

“Hey, let me get in there,” says Josh, and he, too, hugs Eliot, who seems surprised, but not uncomfortable, exchanging a quick, eyebrows-raised look with Margo. “Good to have you back, man.”

“Good to be back,” Eliot returns, and Josh claps him on the shoulder. He backs off very quickly when he sees Margo’s glare, pulling an apologetic grimace, but then her expression turns—she smiles reluctantly, like she’d never admit to it, but she’s happy to see him. Quentin knows she feels bad about abandoning him when he was a fish, but anyone who knows Margo knows she couldn’t have done anything else, not with Eliot on the line. She’d almost gone after Penny with the Sorrows when she realised that he’d taken them to Julia first.

Quentin puts the pile of Eliot’s clothes gently down on the floor. Watching the little knot of his friends around the bed, he feels like he isn’t even there until Eliot looks at him again. He could just have faded into nothingness without that gaze upon him, to pin him to the world. Eliot looks gaunt, still—something about the too-deep shadows around his eyes, his skin still paler than it should be—but lovely as ever. So heartbreakingly lovely Quentin almost can’t stand it.

“Q,” he says, “why are you all the way over there? As a fragile convalescent and recovering victim of possession, I demand a better reception than this.” There’s a beat where Quentin still can’t bring himself to move, and then Eliot rolls his eyes and says, impatient, flinging his hand imperiously, “Come over here.”

And it suddenly doesn’t make any sense that he isn’t over there already. He picks up speed on his way across the room so quickly that Fen and Josh have to move fast to get out of his way in time. He tries to be conscious of Eliot’s injury but it’s hard when the desire to finally touch him is pouring through him like a torrential downpour, when Eliot seems to care just as little as he does, reaching for him and shaking his hand free of Margo’s just so he can wrap both arms around him.

Tears blur in Quentin’s eyes but he doesn’t care because the feel of Eliot’s body in his arms is the only real thing in the universe, his unwashed hair tickling Quentin’s forehead, his scent of blood and hospital-cleanness, his long fingers creasing the back of Quentin’s shirt irreparably, then reaching up to tangle in his hair. Quentin just clings to him, unable to do anything else but memorise the way it feels, the hot joy burning all the way through him, Eliot’s solid weight and mass, the sound he makes, half-laugh, half-sob as he turns his face into Quentin’s hair and kisses the side of his head, like he’d used up his entire supply of composure on that careless, cool command, _come over here_.

It doesn’t feel fair that they have to let go of each other, but eventually they do, Eliot steadying himself on Quentin’s shoulders as he leans back against the pillows, smiling like the sun.

“Hi,” he says, and his eyes are wet.

“Hi,” Quentin echoes him. “It’s really fucking good to see you, El.”

His lips quirk, amused. “Yeah?”

Quentin can’t even pretend to play it cool.

“Yeah,” he says, like that even comes close. In that moment it doesn’t matter that Eliot doesn’t want him the way he wants Eliot; he’s just so, _so_ fucking glad that he’s alright that it feels like flowers are blooming under his skin—like healing magic, like being bathed in Chatwin’s Torrent, a feeling he could get drunk on.

“Jesus, get a room,” Margo says, and Eliot laughs, a weightless, soft breath of a laugh that Quentin receives like a blessing. He reaches for her hand again, twining their fingers together.

“Aw, Bambi,” he says. “Don’t be jealous.”

“I’m not _jealous_.” Margo tosses her hair beautifully. “We all know Coldwater’s got nothing on me.”

“Thanks, Margo,” says Quentin drily, and she throws him a wink. It should be hard to pull off, given that she’s only got one eye, but of course she makes it work.

“Don’t mention it. But while we’re on the subject of rooms and getting them—” She stands, walks over to Josh and pulls him by his collar down into a searingly filthy kiss. Eliot’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead, and he looks at Quentin as if to ask, _did you know about this?_ Quentin just shrugs. Fen is watching Josh and Margo in unabashed fascination; when Margo pulls back to face the rest of them, her hands still wrapped in Josh’s collar and a very self-satisfied smirk on her face, she looks ready to take notes. “Me and fish-boy have some catching up to do.”

She takes Josh by the hand and pulls—he looks slightly punch-drunk, like he doesn’t know where she’s taking him and doesn’t care, either. She stops by Eliot’s side and leans in to kiss him, on both cheeks and then on the mouth, just for good measure, her hands on either side of his face as she draws back.

“El, I love you, I’ll be back later. Don’t tear your stitches.”

His smile is slightly indulgent as he nods. “Have fun.”

“Oh, I _will_. See all you fuckers later.” She picks Josh’s hand up again and leads him to the door; he waves brightly, but as she lays her other hand on the doorknob, there’s a silent crack—a sound which both is and is not—and then Everett is standing behind her, facing the rest of the room. He tilts his head to one side, and suddenly, with ice shooting through his stomach, Quentin _knows_.

“Quentin,” the Monster says.

Quentin had never known Everett, but the thing talking to him now with his mouth is not him. All the giddy joy at seeing Eliot again, at speaking to him—all of it is gone in an instant, a punctured balloon. His gut churns; he stumbles back a step, bumping up against one of the chairs. Eliot reaches out to steady him with a hand fisted in the back of his shirt, but he can hardly feel it.

The movement is enough to catch the Monster’s attention. His gaze flicks to Eliot; he reminds Quentin of a snake, scenting the air for prey. His mouth quirks.

“You,” he says. Eliot’s fingers tighten their grip.

“Me,” he says. His voice is mostly steady, but not entirely. At Quentin’s side, Fen’s reaches slowly for the knife at her belt, and Margo is carefully edging around the Monster to put herself between him and Eliot. Josh follows her with wide eyes; his attempt at stealth would almost be comical, but there’s nothing funny about the excruciating tension in the air. Quentin’s chest has gone into lockdown—he can’t quite believe there’s still oxygen in the room, which, with the Monster’s presence, feels smaller than ever, like a cave-in. “I see you’ve got a new look.”

The Monster smiles.

“This body...” he says, turning his hands over in front of him. “It’s old, but it’s strong. Stronger than yours.”

He raises a hand and without looking, sends Fen, Margo and Josh flying back against the walls behind them, where they stay pinned, conscious, but unable to stand. He advances on Eliot with the slow, predatory grace of a lion, and Quentin can feel himself shaking, head-to-toe. He can’t move, though. Whatever spell has trapped the others, it’s paralysing him, too. He can only watch as the Monster leans over Eliot’s body and, in a grotesque parody of a caress, takes his jaw in its palm. Quentin sees Eliot’s nostrils flare, his chest rising and falling quickly as he tries not to panic, staring into the Monster’s eyes.

“You’re even weaker now than you were before,” the Monster notes, like he’s making an observation about Eliot’s hair or his clothes. That disconnected, almost-apathy had been awful when the Monster was wearing Eliot’s body, but it seems more dangerous, now. The Monster looks Eliot up and down, and then without warning, places a hand over his wound, pressing down, hard, so that Eliot gasps, his body buckling inwards around the centre of the pain, shuddering with it. Quentin jerks helplessly. It’s as if he can feel the phantom echo of the Monster’s touch, splitting him open.

“Eliot!” Margo cries. She’s struggling fiercely against the Monster’s spell, but to no avail. Josh puts a hand on her shoulder, but she shakes him off. “Hey, asshole!”

The Monster turns curiously, lifting its hand from Eliot’s wound. Eliot gasps again, in sudden relief, curling around his stomach. His chest heaves, but between great pants of breath, he still manages to say, “Margo, don’t…”

She ignores him. With her back still stuck to the wall, she somehow summons enough power to force herself to her feet, shoulders bowing under the weight of the spell.

“Remember me?” she spits. Her hair hangs about her face in curtains, and her expression is hard and furious. Her feral rage reminds Quentin of Alice, when she was a niffin. The Monster just regards her calmly, like he’s waiting to see what she’ll do next. “I’m the one who tore you out of his body.” She jerks her head towards Eliot, who, eyes watering with the aftermath of pain, is trying to push himself up against the pillows. He looks as scared as Quentin feels. “And guess what? I did it to your bitch of a sister, too.”

“Margo,” Quentin says, warningly. She pays him no more attention than she’d paid Eliot. Her gaze is fixed unwaveringly on the Monster, and the rest of them can do nothing, frozen, watching her.

“My sister,” the Monster says, softly, as if to himself. He cocks his head to the other side. “You hurt her?”

Margo’s mouth twists into a vicious smile, and Quentin knows with absolute certainty that if she answers him, he will kill her where she stands.

“No,” he says. Everyone turns to him. “No, we didn’t—we didn’t hurt her, she’s safe. We sent her somewhere safe.”

“You sent her somewhere safe,” the Monster repeats, and Quentin nods, his heart pounding thunderously, holding his gaze. _Just believe it_ , he begs. _Please, just believe me._

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“We had to,” says Eliot. He’s still holding his stomach protectively with one arm and sounds a little out of breath, but there’s something in his tone, too, that Quentin recognises from the court in Fillory—his best diplomatic weapon. He works well under pressure, and there is no greater pressure than watching Margo put herself at risk. “She wanted to destroy everything.” He cuts a glance towards Quentin and wets his lips, looking back to the Monster. He clears his throat then speaks slowly, soothingly, easing into the role of confidante. “I know you don’t want that. You like it here, don’t you? The quiet? Your friends?”

The Monster looks at Quentin, too, and Quentin tries to smile, nerves stretched beyond the point of tolerability. He hopes Margo managed to fill Eliot in on everything that had happened before he’d woken up. He hopes Eliot knows what he’s doing.

“She wanted revenge,” the Monster says, returning his attention to Eliot. Eliot nods, holding out a placating hand.  

“I know. And she was right to. Someone hurt you both very badly. But it wasn’t us.”

The Monster scowls; impossibly, even on Everett’s face, it looks childish. “You shot me. At the castle.”

Eliot’s expression flickers, for a moment, but he regains composure quickly. “I did. I’m sorry. That was wrong of me—I shouldn’t have done it. But I was worried about my friends. You know what that’s like, don’t you? To be worried about someone?”

It is impossible to look away from the exchange. The stretched pressure of the atmosphere is unbearable, but watching Eliot spin the Monster this new story is almost mesmerising enough to ignore it. It’s magic in the most non-literal sense, magic just because it’s something he’s good at. Eliot, and his endless charm. Eliot and his guileless, easy demeanour, his soft eyes, the understanding in his low voice. The Monster is as helplessly enraptured as the rest of them; he seems to have forgotten that moments ago, he was torturing him.

“My sister,” he murmurs again.

“We can take you to her,” Eliot says, and warning sparks light up Quentin’s spine. _Danger._ Eliot looks at him, eyebrows raised significantly. _Trust me_ , he seems to be saying. “Quentin knows the way.”

When the Monster looks to him for confirmation, Quentin nods, even though it’s not true. He’ll have to get directions from Alice, though presumably Eliot doesn’t know that.

“Yeah,” he says. His voice comes out rough, so he clears his throat. “Yeah, I do.”

The silence that falls then as the Monster looks consideringly between the two of them is the longest silence of Quentin’s life. His nerves feel like tightrope. He doesn’t dare look at Eliot, or Margo, or tear his eyes from the Monster at all.

“Fine,” says the Monster, and all the air comes rushing out of Eliot’s lungs in an audible rush. “Take me.”

He drops the enchantment that had been holding them all in place, and in an instant, Margo is at Eliot’s side, easing him further upright, gently making sure his stitches are still in place while he murmurs reassurance to her in a low tone, trying to swing his long legs over the side of the bed, which Quentin is _sure_ he shouldn’t be doing. There’s no part of this that doesn’t seem like an immeasurably bad idea, but he doesn’t know what else they can do.

The Monster looks around at the rest of them. Fen is standing warily behind Quentin’s shoulder, dagger drawn, and Josh might just as well still be pinned to the wall; he doesn’t quite seem like he’s able to move.

“Your friends can stay here,” the Monster says, looking at Fen and Josh like they’re ants under his magnifying glass. “If you’re trying to trick me, I’ll come back and kill them when I’m finished with you. If they try to follow us, I’ll kill them now, instead.”

Quentin flinches, swallows, and covers it all with a nod. He knows, by now, that the best way to deal with the Monster is to wait him out, to play along until the moment it is no longer necessary. He’s under no illusions—he knows that the Monster could have them all dead in a second.

Eliot manages to manoeuvre himself out of bed with Margo’s help; he leans on her, her arm around his waist, his hand gripping her shoulder. He’s barefoot in his hospital pyjamas and it makes Quentin’s heart give a panicked little heave against his chest; he seems so impossibly vulnerable.

As if he can read the thought, Eliot gives him a shaky smile; it would be more effective if he didn’t then grimace, as soon as Margo helps him take a step. Quentin starts towards them, but the Monster stops him with a raised palm. He’s watching their lopsided struggle, almost amused, and Quentin seethes, just for a moment, all the frothing rage he’s kept buttoned away for months swelling up like bile before he forces it down again. The Monster turns to the door.

“This way, Quentin,” he says, and Quentin has no choice but to obey. He holds the door, watching Margo and Eliot’s pained, limping progress across the floor. Fen steps up to them as if she’d stop them from leaving, her hand on Eliot’s arm.

“Don’t go,” she says, and Eliot gives her a gentle smile, cradling her cheek for just long enough to drop a kiss on the top of her head.

“Don’t worry,” he says. “I have a plan. You just keep that crown safe, okay?”

She nods, jerkily, her eyes cutting towards Margo, who offers a tight nod.

“We’ll be fine.” She glances back at Josh for a single, loaded moment, then, swallowing, faces forward again, her face set like a soldier’s.

When they pass Quentin in the doorway, Eliot meets his eyes with a complicated little smile and, too briefly, squeezes his hand. Quentin wants to say something—he hardly knows what—but all the words feel solid in his throat, like stones. The whole world seems to be slightly out of his grasp—inconceivable in some fundamental sense. The little insanities of his life stack up like a brick wall which is seconds away from toppling, crashing down on top of him and burying him forever. Eliot’s face, so close and familiar, doesn’t make sense when in all likelihood he is limping to his death. He needs to sleep, he needs to scream, he needs to wrap Eliot in his arms and keep all the rest of reality at bay for the rest of time. He doesn’t do any of those things.

“It’s going to be okay, Q,” Eliot says, like he believes it. And Quentin looks into the summery hazel of his eyes and sees the tightly-leashed pain and the fear and the light, glimmering hope, and thinks, _no, it’s not_. His heart feels cracked. He lets the door fall closed on Josh and Fen, and nods, dropping his gaze.

“Let’s go,” he mutters. He catches quickly up to the Monster and forces himself not to look back.

He’s grateful that the Monster doesn’t try and talk to him. He doesn’t think it’s due to any kind of consideration on his part, only that he’s more preoccupied with curiously taking in the sights and sounds of Brakebills. When Professor Lipson rushes out of the infirmary after them to try and insist that Eliot return to bed, he drops her with a silent spell. To Quentin’s surprise, she’s still breathing when she hits the ground.

They reach the Cottage eventually, and inside, Alice and Julia and Penny all leap immediately to their feet when they see them. Margo’s eye, and her axes, are lying on the dining room table; Penny must have gone to collect them some time after Quentin had left.

“Quentin?” says Alice, frowning between him and the Monster, hands halfway to battle magic readiness. “What’s going on?”

Margo and Eliot stagger forward.

“We’re going to take him to his sister,” Eliot says, and Alice’s eyes go wide and round in understanding.

“Let me help,” she says. The Monster considers her.

“You helped me to this new body,” he says, and Alice barely conceals her flinch.

“Yes,” she says. The Monster nods.

“You can come.” His eyes flick lazily over to Penny and Julia. “Your friends, too. I like it when you’re all in one place.”

“Thank you,” says Alice, twisting her fingers. He doesn’t acknowledge it, just turns to Quentin.

“Where now?”

Quentin nods to the mirror. “Through there.”

The Monster follows his gaze.

“You go first,” he says, and Quentin swallows mutedly. Not looking at anyone, he steps forward to the mirror. Julia crosses the floor to stand beside him, sliding her hand into his. When he looks at her, her dark eyes are clear and determined.

“Together,” she says, squeezing his hand, and he manages to nod. Together does seem better than alone. Hand in hand, they step through the liquid surface of the mirror.

It’s worse than he’d imagined it would be. The cold is the first thing he notices, sudden and frigid, even though the air is perfectly still. He recognises Brakebills, but it’s all wrong—thick, floating motes of something soft and white and unknown fall through the air, and there’s something sinister about them. All the books and signs on the walls are written backwards and the colours are gone, like they’ve been drained clean away. He’s glad of Julia’s hand in his, which stops him from feeling so much like he’s going to fly apart in this alien new environment. He looks down at her, and she gives him a small, reassuring smile.

“You get used to it,” she says quietly. He isn’t sure he wants to.

The Monster is the next one through behind them, then it’s Alice, then Margo and Eliot, with Penny bringing up the rear. Quentin sees Eliot shiver as he steps through the glass; he must be freezing. He and Margo, the only others who’ve never been in the Mirror World before, both look around distrustfully.

“Well,” Eliot says quietly, “at least I match the colour scheme.”

Quentin looks at Alice, and, understanding instantly, she points quickly down the corridor to their left.

“This way,” he says, leading them. They go on like that through what feels like miles of familiar, distorted Brakebills, none of them daring to speak, until they reach the lab.

In the middle of the empty floor, there stands another mirror, eerily like the one they’ve just climbed through except for what lies within it. The Seam looks like nothing so much as a hungry black hole, warping the light around it; Quentin feels the cool, burning energy it radiates and all the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end.

The mirror is still broken. He’d forgotten—his heart barely has time to begin plummeting down towards his stomach before the Monster steps forward and, with a careless gesture, summons beads of gold-white light that begin to sew the cracks back together. Everything Quentin knows about the Mirror World tells him that that simple spell should have killed them all, but the Monster’s power isn’t like theirs. He isn’t a Magician—in all the ways that count, he’s a god.

He turns to Quentin, who shakes gently free of Julia’s grip and joins him in front of the mirror.

“She went through here?” he asks. Quentin nods. “It doesn’t look safe.”

“It is,” says Alice. “We promise it is.”

She’s not as good at lying as Eliot is; Quentin can hear the slightly desperate waver in her voice. But the Monster either doesn’t notice, or doesn’t care. He’s contemplating the Seam again.

“What do you know about this world?” His hands are on either side of the mirror’s frame; he’s so _close_. Quentin grabs frantically for any half-convincing lie to tell him, to make him finally step through, but nothing comes to mind.

“It’s peaceful,” says Eliot, from the back of the room. The Monster glances at him, half-interested, and then the mirror reclaims his attention. “No-one will be able to hurt either of you there.”

Quentin wonders half-hysterically how Eliot knows what to say. From what he’s seen, _peaceful_ is the exact opposite of what the Monster and his sister want. But it seems to be working. The dark, nebulaic swirl inside the mirror absorbs him like nothing else Quentin has seen.

“I’ll go,” says the Monster, finally. But before the frisson of hope that thrills through him even has time to settle, he turns his back on the mirror to face him. “If you come with me.”

Immediately, a chorus of objecting noises from the others, who step forward almost as one, as if any of them could stop the Monster if he really wanted to take Quentin. He doesn’t even look at them as he makes a swift gesture in the air, trapping them behind an invisible wall. Quentin glances at them, and then back at the Monster. If he goes through the mirror, he’s ninety percent sure he’ll die. But—he can’t keep the thought from occurring—if he takes the Monster with him, if he keeps them safe, isn’t it worth it? It would be a hero’s death. A death no-one could fault him for.

He could say yes. He can imagine himself saying yes, and stepping through the insubstantial surface of the mirror with the Monster at his side, and the nothingness that would follow. It would be easy. In a way, it’s even tempting. There’s a part of him that’s been longing for oblivion since he was sixteen, and today, the blows have been non-stop, too many emotional highs and lows for anyone to bear. It would be nice to rest; the Seam looks, in its own way, very quiet. And hadn’t he been willing to do this very thing, more or less, all that time ago at Blackspire? Maybe everything that’s happened since has only been delaying the inevitable.

The Monster waits for his decision silently, just watching him.

“Q,” comes Eliot’s voice, and then when Quentin doesn’t turn around, more forcefully, “ _Quentin.”_

He does turn at that, and the Monster does, too. Eliot, leaning heavily on Margo, is pushing up against the Monster’s barrier like he thinks he can get through by sheer force of will. It ripples where his chest meets it, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s looking at Quentin with an intensity that is rare to see on him, eyes fierce. When he speaks, his voice is low and clipped tight in that uncommonly serious way that he has. There is no sign of the pretence he had been keeping up. The Eliot that had talked the Monster into coming here to begin with is gone, replaced with this hard, steely Eliot who looks like he will drag Quentin out of here with his _teeth_  if it comes to it.

“If you think I got possessed and locked in a prison made of my own memories just so I could come back and watch you make the same _shitty_ deal I saved you from—” he says, but the Monster cuts him off.

“You talk too much,” he says, cocking his head. He lifts his hand and suddenly Eliot is staggering backwards with a gasp, his hand clutching at his throat as the Monster slowly starves him of oxygen. Margo stumbles under his weight, watching him with a look of naked terror on her face as she tries to hold him up.

“Eliot!” she says. His hand is wrapped in her sleeve, and when he falls to his knees, he almost takes her with him. She looks at the Monster with a murderous glare, leaning over him. “Stop it!”

But the Monster ignores her. He’s watching Eliot’s face grow red with the curiosity of a scientist observing a lab rat. Quentin is shaking, watching the same, all the dreamlike composure of a minute before shattered like glass.

“Stop it,” he says, voice trembling, but the Monster pays him no mind, either, and the scrabbling movement of Eliot’s hand grows weaker as his eyelids flutter, and Margo is screaming his name, hands buried in the fabric of his shirt, and the others are looking on in horror, and he’s going to die, right now, unless Quentin does something.

So Quentin does something.

He doesn’t know where the noise that comes out of him comes from, somewhere between a bellow and a battlecry, but the Monster has no time to react to it before Quentin is barrelling into him full-force, hands outstretched to shove him back, back, back, until he tumbles right through the mirror, down into the Seam, screaming in rage. There is wild feeling roaring through Quentin, fear and fury and adrenaline; he catches himself on the mirror’s frame before he can follow the Monster’s fall. When Everett’s body has been lost to the blackness of the void, Quentin, breathing hard, turns back to Eliot and the others with his heart in his throat. For months, he has been wondering how much he can take before he breaks—now, he thinks he’s broken.

Margo is kneeling with Eliot’s head in her lap, brushing the fingers of one hand through his hair and saying his name, over and over. He’s coughing and spluttering, reaching blindly for her other hand and _alive_. A jolt goes through Quentin from his feet to the crown of his head, a relief so intense it’s almost painful. He senses Alice’s eyes on him, and Julia’s and Penny’s, and turns towards them. They’re just staring, silent, wide-eyed, and then Penny, looking him up and down, says, “Damn, Coldwater.”

Eliot is struggling weakly upright with Margo’s help and Quentin is more tired than he’s ever been in his life. He knows that there will be explanations to give, but right now, he can’t bring himself to care.

“Let’s get out of here,” he mutters. He averts his gaze from everyone else’s as he goes to Margo and Eliot, offering his hand to help pull Eliot unsteadily to his feet. “Are you alright?”

Eliot stares down at him like he’s never seen him before.

“Yeah,” he says, and, frowning at the roughness of his voice, clears his throat. “Fine.”

Quentin nods. “Good.”

“Quentin—” Margo begins, but Quentin just keeps going, out of the room and down the corridor to where the other mirror is, the one they came through. He’s shaking again. He doesn’t know if he ever stopped.

 _You nearly let him take you_ , says the voice in his head. _Even knowing you’d die, you nearly said yes_.

 _But I didn’t_ , Quentin thinks back. In the replay that loops through his brain, he sees the Monster target Eliot and knows, undeniably, that that had been the thing to change his mind.

He climbs through the mirror and back into the Cottage and doesn’t stop until he’s in his old room, dropping like a stone onto the edge of his bed and dragging both hands over his face. The writhing feeling inside his chest is too powerful to parse. He can hear his heart racing.

He’d thought, when he tried again with Alice, that things could go back to the way they’d been so long ago, that he could let Eliot go the way Eliot wanted him to, but now he knows that’s not true. He’d thought, even after Alice had let him down so gently, that he could learn to just be Eliot’s friend again, and disentangle all these complicated, messy things between them. And he’d thought, in a secret, shameful part of him that he doesn’t want to acknowledge, that if he got Eliot back from the Monster, maybe he could finally rest for good. But how can he? How can he, now, when the Monster is gone and both of his best friends are back, and there’s no new threat looming on the horizon?

“Shit,” he mutters to himself, his voice buried in his hands. He doesn’t want to die. Somehow, that’s almost harder to accept than the alternative.

He hears the others downstairs as they make it out of the Mirror World, too. He should go and talk to them, pull himself together and enjoy the fucking victory—after all, in all likelihood, some other unbeatable threat is going to loom up out of the dark underbed of their lives soon enough. He should make the most of the peace while he can. Instead, he just listens to their muffled voices. He hears the Cottage door open and close—someone leaving, or someone arriving?—and then slightly raised voices, an argument he can’t make out, but still, he doesn’t move. His room is quiet, undemanding. When he closes his eyes, the world vanishes, and asks nothing of him.

He isn’t surprised when he hears footsteps on the stairs, in the hallway outside his room. He’d assumed someone would come looking for him eventually, and, sure enough, when he unburies his face, Julia is standing in his doorway, considering him.

“Hey,” he says, straightening. He winces as he hears his back crack, kept too long in one position. “Everything okay?”

Julia nods. “Seems like. Lipson and Fogg were here just a minute ago—you missed them.”

She invites herself in and he shifts on the edge of the bed to make room for her, pure force of habit.

“Is Lipson okay?” he asks as she sits down. “The Monster…”

“She’s fine. He just knocked her out.” Her lips quirk. “She still had enough energy to yell at Eliot for leaving bed, so I think she’s pretty much recovered.”  
  
Her voice is conspicuously casual when she mentions Eliot’s name, and Quentin can’t quite decide if it’s deliberate or not.

“And he’s okay?” he asks, trying for the same nonchalance. Julia’s eyes slide sideways towards him, not fooled in the slightest. She nods.

“Under extreme duress, he let Margo and Lipson bully him back to the infirmary. He didn’t want to go,” she adds. “I think he would rather have come and talked to you.”

Quentin refuses to look at her, mostly because he doesn’t trust his expression. His stomach gives a little flip at her words.

“And everyone else?” he asks.

“They’re all fine, Q,” she says. “Honestly? The person I’m most worried about is you.”

He does look at her then, brows furrowed. “Why?”

Her mouth twists; she gives him a look as if it should be obvious.

“Q, come on. We all saw you at the Seam just now. You were really thinking about going with the Monster, weren’t you?”

He hesitates. He could deny it, but there’d be no point. Julia knows him better than that.

“Not really,” he hedges. “I mean. Maybe, a little.”

“And did you forget that I was there when you told him he could kill you if he wanted? Because I remember that little speech pretty clearly.” Her eyes search his, piercing. “You can’t do things like that, Q. You aren’t allowed to throw your life away.”

“That’s not what I was doing,” he argues. “I just thought—if it was the only way to stop him—if it kept you all safe—” He breaks off, looking at her. “It was my turn, right? Alice and Eliot and Penny and you, you’ve all given things up. How can I do anything less?”

Julia shakes her head. “It isn’t a competition, Quentin. None of us would’ve wanted you to take the deal—even if it meant the Monster didn’t get sealed away. You matter more.”

“Jules.” He appreciates the pep talk, but she doesn’t need to lie to him.

“I’m serious,” she says. “Don’t ever think that we’d be better off without you. It isn’t true. We need you. You really think I’d be okay if you died? You think Alice would? _Eliot_?” He flinches, almost imperceptibly, at Eliot’s name. “That’s not how it works.”

“It’s just—” He doesn’t know how to explain it; a frustrated breath comes out of him. “It’s been really hard, Julia. For a really long time.”

Her eyes are very gentle on him. “I know.”

“I mean, Eliot got _possessed_ and my dad _died_ , you know? And for months I was helping this _monster_ do the most horrible shit, just because I was so scared of what would happen if I tried to stop him. I was just, fucking terrified that he’d like, kill you or walk Eliot’s body off the top of the penthouse or whatever, and I couldn’t’ve stopped him.” He can hear his words gathering momentum, running into each other like boulders in a rockslide. “If I fucked it up, he was going to kill everyone I cared about, so I had to just—just lock it all away, everything I was feeling, because if I didn’t, I was going to lose it, and—” His breath hitches; he can hear the tears in his voice. “I’m just _tired_ , Jules. I didn’t want to go with him, but I would’ve done it. If it kept you all safe, I would’ve done it.”

“Q,” she says, voice laden with sympathy, and wraps an arm around him, tugging him into her side so his head rests on her shoulder. She squeezes, tight. “You can’t just throw yourself in front of every martyrdom-shaped bullet that comes your way. No-one’s going to appreciate your big, heroic sacrifice at your funeral.”

He sniffs, scrubbing the wetness from his eyes.

“I know. I know that.” Still, sometimes he can picture it. As if she knows what he’s thinking, Julia rubs his shoulder gently.

After a pause, she says, “Remember when we used to play chess in high school? And you always said that it was unfair that the king was so important, because he never got to do anything cool like the other pieces.” She pulls slightly away to make sure he’s looking at her. “ _You_ are the king. It’s game over without you, okay? You don’t have to be the bravest or the strongest—you just have to be _here_. No-one else could have brought this group together.”

From the mire of his weary misery, a small, surprised voice points out that her logic makes a bizarre kind of sense. He’s never going to be as smart as Alice, or as strong as Julia. He doesn’t have Kady’s ferocity, or Josh’s good humour, or Margo’s iron will, or Eliot’s charisma. He doesn’t have any special powers, like Penny. But he doesn’t know anyone else who could’ve got someone like Margo to work alongside someone like Alice. It’s insignificant, and yet it feels like the most important fact in the universe.

“If I’m the king,” he says, still trying to work it into his worldview, “does that make you the queen?”

Julia laughs.

“As soon as I get my powers back,” she says, nodding. “But don’t tell Margo. I have a feeling she’d fight me for the crown.”

He snorts and she smiles fondly, withdrawing her arm from around him so that she can knock their shoulders together.

“It’s all going to be okay, Q,” she says. “Don’t worry so much.”

He rolls his eyes, but it does make him feel a little better.

“Oh, look at that,” he says drily, “I’m cured.”

She laughs again, a bright, quiet sound, eyes crinkling familiarly.

“It’s a miracle,” she says. She gives his hand a quick squeeze, then, with a sigh, stands, stretching her arms over her head.

“I’m going to go and practise some party tricks with 23,” she says. “I think my powers will come back quicker that way. You should get some rest. It’s been a long day.” She leans in, one soft hand on his shoulder, and he closes his eyes as she presses a kiss to his cheek. “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah,” he says, watching her go to the door. “See you later.”

She wiggles her fingers in a wave, then closes the door behind her with a gentle click. For a second, he just looks blankly at the white-painted wood, and then, sighing, lets himself fall backwards onto the mattress, his feet still planted on the floor. Julia’s right—he should probably sleep. Instead, he stares up at the ceiling, thinking about everything else she’d said. He feels—not precisely content, but certainly more settled. Less numbly exhausted—no longer sinking, but treading water, instead.

He doesn’t know how long he lies like that, lost in his thoughts. He’s interrupted, at some point, by a light knock on his door.

“Come in,” he says. When the door opens to reveal Eliot, he’s surprised. He pushes himself into a sitting position. “Eliot.” His throat feels suddenly dry. “Where’s Margo? I thought you were in the infirmary.”

Eliot’s mouth twists into a smile, and Quentin’s heart thumps unevenly against his ribs, like it has a hundred thousand times before.

“It got boring,” he says, shutting the door behind him. He’s properly dressed, in the dark shirt and trousers Quentin and Alice had picked out, the burgundy fabric of his vest a perfect match to his shiny shoes. His hair even looks like it’s been freshly washed, although it isn’t as neat as he usually keeps it. He is leaning on a handsome, black and silver cane that, with a start, Quentin realises he’s seen before. “And as for where Bambi is, I seem to remember her making some noise about dragging Josh off for some truly athletic victory sex. Lucky man.”

He limps over to the bed and Quentin makes room for him automatically, his mind distracted, flipping through all the memories he has of a much older Eliot, holding that same cane in his weathered grip. When he sinks down next to him, sighing in relief, Quentin’s mouth is too dry to ask him about it.

“I didn’t know if you’d be asleep,” he says, like Quentin’s silence doesn’t bother him. Julia said there hadn’t been much of that going around.” He looks at him, then, a frank, open look, his eyes like two bright river stones, dappled brown and grey in the low light of Quentin’s bedroom. Quentin can’t hold his gaze without feeling like he’s drowning. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there, Q.”

Quentin frowns. As if Eliot is the one who needs to apologise.

“It’s okay. I’m sorry I didn’t get you out sooner, I—” He breaks himself off with a bitter half-laugh, looking down at his hands. “I’m sorry. I really tried, El.”

“I know you did. I’ve had the whole story from Margo and Julia.” He grins, a warm, teasing tone creeping into his voice. “Did you really lick a dragon egg?”

Quentin snorts, dropping his hands. “That was Penny.”

“Hard to imagine Penny40 doing something like that.”

“Tell me about it.” He can’t stop himself from glancing back at him, then. There’s no way he’s here to talk about Penny. He wants to ask but when he looks, Eliot is already gazing back at him, level-eyed, and he can’t make the words come out. Eliot’s looking at him as if _he’s_ the one who’s been gone for months, his eyes—the colour of dead holly leaves—skating over every one of his features like he’s scared he’ll miss something. Quentin feels the back of his neck grow warm with the intensity of his scrutiny, but cannot turn his face away. The truth is, he doesn’t want to stop looking at Eliot, either.

“Your hair’s shorter,” Eliot murmurs, after an eternity. Quentin, immediately, self-consciously, raises one hand to his hair.

“Yeah,” he says. “I was a, uh, lecturer, before. When none of us had our memories. I think he did it.”

Eliot’s mouth curls up at one corner. “It suits you.”

Quentin blushes. “Thanks.”

He drops his hand lamely, feeling like the biggest idiot in the known universe, clumsy and slow. All that overwhelming _feeling_ is still boiling just a scant inch under his skin, an agony of the best kind, but he can do nothing with it. How to even begin telling Eliot what it was like without him, what it’s like to have him back. He knows half a dozen languages by now, but none of them have words enough. Nevertheless, he has to try.

“Listen, Eliot—”

Eliot raises a palm, silencing him, abruptly almost businesslike.

“Wait,” he says. “I want to hear whatever it is you have to say, Q, but I just—” He sighs, sitting up straight and fussing with the bottom of his vest like he needs to compose himself before he carries on. “I need to talk to you about something, first.”

He lets out a deep breath through his nose. Whatever it is that’s on his mind, it seems to be the kind of thing that Quentin should let him work through on his own, but he can’t pretend that it doesn’t make him a little nervous. Eliot rarely allows himself to be this sincere, especially not without prompting. Quentin knows that it costs him—he has been sheltering behind his carefully crafted persona for so long that letting it drop, even for a moment, takes actual effort. He knows that he doesn’t always forgive himself for it, which means that whatever he wants to say now has been weighed, and found to be worth the price. That’s unusual enough to have Quentin worried.

Eliot rubs the side of his face with one long hand and the movement is weary and human, so unlike anything the Monster ever did that it hits Quentin all over again, the profound, bone-shaking gratitude he’d felt when he’d seen his eyes open as he lay, bleeding out, on the forest floor.

“Okay,” he says. He drops his hand to his lap, and Quentin realises that he hasn’t put his rings back on yet. His hands look weirdly bare without them. “Okay, so. First of all, I want to tell you how deeply fucked it was that you even _considered_ jumping into the mirror with that thing.”

“Julia beat you to it,” Quentin tells him, and he nods.

“Good,” he says. He cuts his gaze towards Quentin, brows bent hard over his eyes. “Because it was completely, royally fucked, Q.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

Eliot shakes his head. “Don’t apologise. Just don’t do it again, okay? I know that death seems to be kind of a take-it-or-leave-it thing with our particular friendship group, but I’d rather not test the upper limit on that. Next time some dickbag magical entity is asking you to jump into the literal fucking void, you get to the pushing-them-to-their-doom part way sooner, okay?”

Quentin feels himself smile. “I’ll take it under advisement.”

Eliot nods again. “Good.”

He turns his attention to Quentin’s bedroom window, where a leaf is drifting idly past. Quentin watches him, but he seems not to notice. Quentin raises his eyebrows.

“Was that all you wanted to say?” he asks, and Eliot huffs a laugh, glancing at him.

“I wish,” he says. His eyes search Quentin’s for a moment, and then he sighs, and closes them, and flops backwards onto the bed with a pained grunt when the motion pulls at his stitches.

“Ow,” he mutters. He’s covering his face with his hands, but he sounds annoyed at himself. He lets his hands fall to the mattress on either side of him, and for a moment, just stares up at the ceiling like Quentin had been doing only moments before. Quentin, in a way he knows he’ll feel guilty about later, takes the moment to enjoy watching him without being watched himself, and then Eliot half-lifts his head to squint in his direction.

“Come down here,” he says. “If I move again, I think my guts could fall out.”

Quentin sighs, but does as asked, lying down next to him. He leaves a careful inch of space between them.

“Don’t make jokes about that,” he says as he tries to get comfortable. Eliot watches him, smiling quietly.

“What, you don’t find the thought of my gory demise amusing?”

Quentin turns his face so the full effect of his glare is felt. “Not even a little bit.”

His smile widens, revealing his dimples. “Fair enough. Margo didn’t laugh, either.”

They lapse into silence again, The problem with this position, Quentin thinks, is that their faces are far too close to each other. Eliot’s face is devastating at close range. Quentin is still haunted by the way it had looked in the candlelight after that first year at the Mosaic, when he hadn’t been able to stop himself from leaning in to kiss him. The expression Eliot had worn in the brief moment after, so softly and sweetly surprised, had blown a hole clean through him. A shot from which he has never recovered.

The worst part is the way Eliot’s just looking at him, not speaking, tracing over his face like it’s a photograph he’s trying to memorise. It makes him want things he knows he can’t have, and he’s restless with the wanting of them. Eliot wets his lips, and Quentin follows the movement irresistibly.

“Q,” he says, drawing Quentin’s eyes back to his.

“Yeah?” His voice comes out softer than he meant it. He can’t help it; his heart is misbehaving.

“I wanted to say sorry.” Eliot’s voice is just as soft as his had been. His breath stirs the hair that’s fallen over Quentin’s cheek.

Quentin frowns. “Why?”

“After the Mosaic,” he starts, voice careful, and Quentin can’t quite hide his flinch. He tears his eyes away from Eliot’s, looking for anything else to distract him.

“You don’t need to—” he says, and breaks off before he can finish. The wound from that memory under Margo’s wedding arch isn’t raw anymore, but he still can’t face it without an echo of the searing ache.

“I do. Q, look at me.” Quentin does, reluctantly, and Eliot gives him a brief, sorrowful smile. “I need to apologise, because what I did was unforgivable.”

“Eliot—”

Eliot holds up his hand again. “Let me finish. This is a ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’ kind of thing, in that I’m pretty sure I’ll be too chickenshit to ever bring it up again if you interrupt.”

“I don’t understand,” says Quentin. He doesn’t know why Eliot would dredge all of this up again, when Quentin has been working so hard to leave it behind. It seems uncharacteristically cruel.

“I’m working up to it, I promise.” Eliot squeezes his eyes closed, drawing a deep breath. He opens them again and trains them intently on Quentin’s face. “Okay. So. I bet you’ve been wondering how I managed to get that message to you, in the park.”

Quentin nods, hesitantly, failing to see what that has to do with anything except that that had been how Eliot had made sure he knew he was real, referencing the stupid, crazy thing that he had said. He’s replayed it over and over— _fifty years, who gets proof of concept like that, peaches and plums, motherfucker_ —but it only hurts.

“It wasn’t easy,” Eliot continues. “When I was possessed, the Monster had me locked way, way out of his way. Here, in fact.” He gestures around them, and Quentin furrows his brow.

“My bedroom?”

Eliot laughs, gently, shooting a fond look in his direction. “No. The Cottage. My happy place.” His voice goes soft with something Quentin can’t quite recognise. “Bambi was there. You were there. Nothing ever changed unless I wanted it to.”

“Sounds nice,” Quentin can’t keep himself from commenting. Eliot nods.

“As far as subconscious memory prisons go, I can think of worse,” he agrees. “That was what the Monster designed it for, I guess. As long as I was drinking bottomless margaritas with my favourite people in the world, I wasn’t looking for a way out.”

“But you found one, eventually.”

Eliot nods. “Yeah. The guy the Monster was inhabiting before he moved on to me—his name was Charlton. He told me there was a door, hidden somewhere in my memories. If I could get to it, I could take back control. Sounds simple enough, right?” He waits for Quentin to nod. “Only, outside of the happy place, the Monster had filled up my head with all kinds of other monsters who seemed very enthusiastic about the idea of ripping me to pieces. I couldn’t leave to go rooting through my hippocampus hunting for elusive doors without serious risk to life and limb.” He glances at Quentin. “It was a real carrot vs. stick situation.”

His tone is flippant, but Quentin knows him well enough to hear the dark current that lies beneath it. He can’t imagine what it must have been like.

“How did you get out?” he asks. Eliot sighs. As the story goes on, it feels more and more like a performance—the memory of it translated into entertainment, as if Eliot would like to pretend that it had never happened to him at all, only that it was something he’d heard, somewhere.

“Well, that was the ingenious part,” he says. “I came up with some human shields to distract the Monster’s monsters while I dug through decades of undisclosed trauma, trying to find a way out. I’m afraid you were one of the casualties—sorry about that.”  
  
Quentin doesn’t really care.

“Trauma?” he repeats. Eliot hums, and then sees Quentin’s expression.

“Oh, I forgot to mention that part,” he says. “Yes, trauma.” He sighs again. “So, in a twist, which, retrospectively, seems embarrassingly predictable, of course it turned out that the door was hidden in the memory that was most painful for me to revisit.” He smiles without humour. “It took a while to figure out what that was. I think I’ve logged enough self-reflection hours to last me for the next thirty years of my life.”

Quentin is trying to imagine the things Eliot would’ve had to have faced. Mike, maybe. Losing his daughter in Fillory. The first time he realised he had magic, and that little boy had died. There are other things, he knows, things that Eliot never really addressed even in that other lifetime, things that he has gathered himself from half-serious jokes and conjecture, from careful observation. He knows how much it has cost Eliot, in blood and sweat and tears, to leave certain parts of himself behind. He has worked upon himself like Michaelangelo upon a block of marble, mercilessly shearing away the things he sees as imperfections. Chunks of his past transformed into the dust and rubble from which he rises. _God_ , thinks Quentin. The idea of him having to face all of those sloughed-off histories makes Quentin’s chest hurt as if something is constricting around it.

“I’m sure you know that there’s a lot of stuff in my life that I’m not proud of,” he’s saying now. He isn’t looking at Quentin. Resting in the middle of his stomach, he’s rubbing the knuckles of his left hand with the fingers of his right. “I’ve done a pretty good job of training myself not to think about it.” His gaze flits up to Quentin’s then, and stays, almost like a challenge. “Do you want to know what the worst thing I ever did was? The memory that I’d hidden so far out of sight that the Monster didn’t think I’d ever look for it?”

 _No_ , Quentin wants to say. _I don’t care about what you’ve done_. But it’s clear that Eliot wants—maybe even needs—him to say yes, so. Slowly, he nods, and Eliot’s face breaks into a bitter smile.

“The worst thing I ever did,” he says, and his voice is heavy, with resignation, but with relief, too. “Was tell you I wouldn’t choose you. I have undeniable proof of it.”

His eyes are clear. Something about the angle of his chin, even lying down, makes Quentin think of unrepentant aristocrats led to the guillotine. He thinks about this instead of thinking about the sledgehammer blow that’s just been dealt to his ribs.  

“I don’t understand,” he hears himself say. He brings a hand to his forehead and shields his eyes as if from the sun, even though the only thing he’s really trying to avoid looking at right now is Eliot’s face. It’s a hopeless task. He drops his hand almost immediately because he has to able to see Eliot’s eyes when he asks, voice unsteady, “What are you saying to me right now?”

“I’m saying that the biggest trauma of my life wasn’t causing my dad’s heart attack or beating up my childhood best friend for being gay. It was refusing to give us a chance.”

“You said we wouldn’t work.” Quentin has to remind him, because he feels like his grip on reality is slipping. Something tectonic is happening in the region of his chest—an underwater volcano, the earth moving. “You said it wasn’t us.”

“I did,” Eliot agrees. It’s unbearable, the steadiness of his gaze. His voice has a little waver in it that Quentin clings to, hard proof that he isn’t the only one experiencing tremors.

“ _Why?_ ”

“Because I’m a coward,” he says, simply. “I could handle being in love with you, Q, but I didn’t think I could handle really giving us a try if it was only going to end in disaster.”

“It wouldn’t have—” Quentin begins unthinkingly, the rest of his brain reverberating with the shock of _I could handle being in love with you, Q._

“It might have.” Eliot’s voice is not argumentative. He sounds like he’s practised this part of the conversation a million times. Maybe he has, thinks the part of Quentin’s brain that’s still capable of thought. Maybe this is how he managed to convince himself that he’d made the right choice, all that time ago. “Neither of us could have guaranteed otherwise. Fifty years in an alternate timeline is one thing, but out here, in the real world? I know myself better than to assume I wouldn’t have fucked up, eventually.”

“Then why bother telling me now?” Quentin demands. He feels like one of those trees you see in video clips of hurricanes. Like all of his leaves are being stripped away by a force too massive to withstand. “If you’re so convinced we’d be a catastrophe, why bother?”

Eliot shifts, just a little, so he can get a better view of Quentin’s face.

“It seemed worth the risk,” he says very softly, and whatever was left of Quentin Coldwater is swept violently away. “It occurred to me that the chances of you breaking my heart before some supernatural nightmare creature rips it out of my chest are slim to none. And if I’m going to die young, maybe I deserve a little happiness in the meantime.”

Quentin just stares at him, unable to speak. Something flickers across Eliot’s face, and he looks abruptly away.

“Of course, all of that’s assuming the offer still stands,” he says, and his tone is so forcedly cavalier that it almost makes Quentin cringe. “I realise it’s been a while. I wouldn’t blame you if—”

Whatever brainless, idiotic thing was about to come out of his mouth, Quentin will never know. It gets lost between their mouths when Quentin seizes a handful of his vest and hauls himself across the space between them for a kiss.

Eliot makes a muffled noise of surprise that Quentin immediately swallows, thinking, somewhat savagely, _good_.

It isn’t their first kiss. It isn’t even their first kiss in this timeline. But it burns Quentin up from the soles of his feet to the top of his head. He’s lying half on top of Eliot, torso twisted, both hands ruining the expensive fabric of his vest, and Eliot’s mouth is soft and yielding under his, like he’d let Quentin do anything to him. He has one hand resting cautiously on the small of Quentin’s back, as if he’s afraid to take more than that. He tastes like mint toothpaste and Margo’s lip balm, almond and coconut. Quentin kisses him, and kisses him, and kisses him, something racing hot through his veins so that every nerve is awake, feeling this.

He pulls away just far enough to see Eliot’s face properly, not moving his hands. Eliot’s eyes are wide and eaten up by his pupils, blown so dark and wide that they almost swallow the colour whole.

“I’m pissed at you,” Quentin says. He can feel his chest heaving as he pulls in oxygen, can feel Eliot’s chest under him doing the same. Eliot nods. A dazed kind of smile pulls at his mouth.

“Okay,” he says. Quentin nods, once, then leans back down to kiss him again. He untangles one hand from Eliot’s vest and uses it to push through his hair, and Eliot makes the best noise, this hum from deep in his throat that Quentin wants to hear over and over. His other hand reaches to curl around Quentin’s neck, his broad palm covering the skin there like it was made to, and it’s perfect; it washes any memory of the Monster’s touch clean away, like fresh water. Quentin makes a noise of his own, a breathless sound he can’t keep in, and Eliot leans up to chase it, only to break away with a sharp, pained gasp as his body remembers its wound.

“Fuck,” he says, wincing. His hand drops away from Quentin’s neck to hold his stomach, and he breathes deep, trying to master the pain, falling back against the mattress. Quentin watches him, concern replacing the heat that’s been surging over him.

“Are you okay?” he asks. He lifts his weight off of him, shifting a little to the side to give him room to breathe, and he nods.

“Yeah,” he says, “give me a minute. Lipson refused to give me any of the good drugs because she says I have a substance problem. Bitch.”

He says this without heat. They both wait a moment for his breathing to return to normal, the colour coming back into his face, and then he looks at Quentin.

“Well,” he says, “how’s that for a mood killer?”

“Sorry,” says Quentin. “I kind of forgot you were hurt.”

“Q.” Eliot closes his eyes. Quentin tries not to get distracted by his long, dark eyelashes, fanning against his cheeks. “Please don’t ever apologise for making out with me. It’s bad for my self-esteem.”

He opens his eyes, turning to face him.

“Sorry,” says Quentin, again, and he rolls his eyes.

“You’re forgiven,” he says. Then, wetting his lips, suddenly hesitant again, “So, just so I’m sure we’re on the same page here, should I take all of this to mean…”

He trails off, eyebrows raised, and flicks his fingers meaningfully between the two of them. Quentin sighs, rolling onto his back. His pulse is still racing; he waits a moment for it to slow down.

“Do you know how many times I’ve watched you die?” he says, glancing up at Eliot’s face. Eliot blinks, clearly surprised at the change in conversation, but shakes his head, slowly,waiting to see where Quentin’s going with this. Quentin returns his gaze to the ceiling. It will be easier to get through this, he thinks, if he doesn’t have to look at Eliot. “It’s kind of a crazy amount. I mean, I bet there were even more in a bunch of those other timelines, but I don’t remember them. But, you know, even so, you’d think I would’ve gotten used to it. The thought of you dying.” His mouth twists. “I really haven’t, though. It still feels like the end of the world.”

He looks up again. Eliot’s face is still and serious, his eyes fixed on Quentin’s.

“Maybe you didn’t know, but the Monster told me you were dead,” Quentin continues. “I believed him.”

“You didn’t have any reason not to,” Eliot says, voice soft, like he’s trying to comfort him. Quentin nods without looking at him.

“I know. But then we were there in the park, and you told me you were alive…” He shakes his head, reliving it. “It was like, after I found out, it was the only thing that mattered to me, you know? I literally couldn’t think about anything else but getting you back. I was a mess.”

“But you did it,” Eliot says gently. He reaches for Quentin’s hand like he can’t stop himself. His thumb rubs across the back of his knuckles, and Quentin closes his eyes for a moment, just to enjoy the way it feels.

“It was kind of a team effort,” he says, opening them again. “I don’t know what we would have done if Margo hadn’t come back with those axes.”  
“You would have figured something out.” Eliot says it with absolute confidence, like any alternative is impossible. Quentin turns his head again, to look at him properly.

“I would’ve died trying,” he says. Eliot’s expression splits down the middle.

“Q,” he murmurs, helplessly. His eyes drop to Quentin’s mouth, and he can’t close the space between them without aggravating his injury, but he leans as far as he can and lets Quentin meet him in the middle. The kiss makes Quentin think of the bruised skin of a peach, nothing but sweet, giving tenderness.

He pulls away after not very long, determined not to get distracted. Drawing away, he can see the tiny, bereft crease in Eliot’s brows just before his eyes open, and his heart squeezes.

“What I’m trying to say,” he says, “is that I’ve had, like, a lot of time to think about what you mean to me. What my life would be like without you.” Eliot looks sombre, like he’s waiting for Quentin to pronounce a death sentence. Instead, Quentin says, “And it was bullshit when you said I wouldn’t choose you. I would.”

“Yeah?” There, the soft curve of Eliot’s mouth.

“Yeah,” Quentin tells him. “Would you choose me?”

“A hundred times over,” Eliot promises. He skates his thumb over the line of Quentin’s cheekbone, searching his face. “I’m sorry it took me so long to admit it.”

“Me, too.” His mouth kicks up into a smirk, and Eliot’s smile widens, too, an automatic response. “You owe me like, a year of heartfelt pining.”

Eliot huffs, half a laugh. “I’ll see what I can do.”

His hand finds the back of Quentin’s neck again, reeling him in. Quentin goes effortlessly. When he presses his chest against Eliot’s, he can feel their hearts beating against each other. _This_ , he thinks. _Just this, for as long as I’m allowed to have it._ He feels like a door thrown open, all the light pouring through him. Eliot’s fingers tangled in his hair. The dark and quiet of the room around them, the soft blue sheets of the bed.

It’s inevitable, at some point, that reality will hunt them down again. The Library, Kady’s hedge witch rebellion, Irene McAllister. Quentin’s own self-destructive brain, Eliot’s insecurity. A million other problems that just haven’t shown their faces yet.

Right now, none of it is as important as the way Eliot’s fingers curl into the back of Quentin’s shirt, the way he nips, so careful and light, at the underside of his jaw. There isn’t a monster in the world that Quentin wouldn’t face, for a chance at this. _Peaches and plums_ , he thinks, and Eliot hums into his mouth, as if in agreement. _Peaches and motherfucking plums_.

**Author's Note:**

> *Arrives in fandom two weeks late with world's most self-indulgent fanfic*
> 
> So, in case it hasn't been stated clearly enough already, FUCK the finale. I wanted to write about a thousand different fics after I saw it, but this was the one with the longest legs. 
> 
> Come find me at queer-z0mbies.tumblr.com.


End file.
